When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

You'd never killed anyone. Then you had.

The military preferred - invariably - those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?